The Future of the Public Policy School in a World of Disruptive Innovation
| Author | Lisa Anderson |
| Date | 01 February 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12634 |
| Published date | 01 February 2019 |
The Future of the Public Policy School in a
World of Disruptive Innovation
Lisa Anderson
Columbia University
Helmut Anheier has given us a compelling review of the
state of the public policy school today—a veritable ‘SWOT
analysis’,asbefits the curriculum of such enterprises—and
has proposed several reforms to position such schools to
meet the challenges of this fraught moment in world his-
tory. And, still better, he has done so with his customary
good humor and generosity.
So, what is there to add? Very little but for an accent not
on the ‘SW’of his analysis –the strengths and weaknesses
of the public policy school that he so effectively rehearses –
but the ‘OT’–the environmental ‘opportunities and threats’.
As he astutely observes, ‘the gap between policy schools
and the outside world of politics is widening’. A more thor-
ough-going analysis of what is happening in that ‘outside
world’reveals the value, indeed the necessity, of his propos-
als for reform.
After all, whether seen from New York or from Cairo, ours
is a world of disruptive innovation. There was a time, as
Anheier rightly points out, at the dawn of the public policy
school a century or so ago, when tradition was powerful
and the correct policies were rarely ambiguous. We knew
the public good; all that was needed was to improve its
management. The public policy schools of the day were
schools of public administration, expected to design efficient
administrative processes and train the skilled administrators
to follow them. Then, with the unleashing of mid-century
high modernist ambitions to actually improve the public
good, policies themselves were to be invented, debated,
designed and developed: we would end war, eradicate
inequality, eliminate poverty, conquer outer space, master
climate change. All that was needed was a well-constructed
plan and we could do anything. Policy schools were to take
the goals and generate the plans, providing as well the
expert professionals to design and implement them.
Certainly there were tensions, particularly, as Anheier
rightly notes, between academic scholars and policy practi-
tioners –tensions I have described as between those who
have questions and those who need answers.
1
Perhaps the
tension I neglected then and he highlights now –that
between policy and politics, or what might be described as
those who need answers and those who want talking points
–is the more crucial today.
This is so because the mid-century era of limitless opti-
mism slowly receded. As command economies faltered and
high-tech mega-projects went awry, we began to lose confi-
dence in well-constructed plans, or even plans of any kind.
We were no longer sure we knew the ‘all that was needed’
to serve the public for whom these policy schools were
designed –or even who or what that public is.
At the same time, teenagers in garages and university
dormitories who seemed to have no plan at all, only time
and a bit of unruliness, tinkered and fiddled their way to
changing our world: creating the vastly powerful mecha-
nisms by which we learn about, expand, shrink and reshape
our conceptions of the public realm, enterprises like Micro-
soft and Apple, Google and Facebook. Yes, of course, the
internet itself, on which these private enterprises depend, is
a product of the high modernist American military-industrial
complex, and the founders of Apple, Google and Facebook
all went to public schools. But they were non-conformists
just as conformity itself seemed to be coming to a dead-
end. Rules, it appeared, were for fools.
We have now lived for more than two decades in a world
in which disruption reigns supreme and rules, norms, con-
ventions and increasingly even laws are suspect. We admire
‘creative destruction’, we advocate dismantling the regula-
tory state, we celebrate revolutions (at least if they are far
away), we reward libertarian skepticism of authority, we
indulge offenses against the etiquette of modern gover-
nance, as political figures from the Philippine president
Rodrigo Duterte to the UK foreign secretary Boris Johnson
to the US president Donald Trump mock, threaten and bully
their political opponents.
Yet we know that laws, norms and conventions are essen-
tial to human society. Whether in the smallest family or the
vast ‘international community’to which we so often appeal
today, rules and conventions govern our interaction.
A Response to ‘On the Future
of the Public Policy School’,
Helmut K. Anheier
*
*Anheier, H. K. (2019), ‘On the Future of the Public Policy School’,
Global Policy, 10 (1), pp. 75-83. First published online: 08 October
2018, https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12599
©2019 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Global Policy (2019) 10:1 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12634
Global Policy Volume 10 . Issue 1 . February 2019
84
Response Article
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